In a large, geographically distributed organization, collaboration in and between local or distributed teams and individuals is becoming increasingly important. Various types of communication and action are used in distributed teams to collaborate on projects. These include face-to-face meetings, e-mails, fax, phone calls or video conferences, short message service (SMS), instant messages, or virtual project rooms. However, without knowing a person's current business activities, a task of choosing the appropriate means of communication and/or action is difficult.
In current working environments of large organizations, knowledge of a person's “business activities” is spread throughout various different systems and information sources. Simplified examples of business activities are “attending a meeting”, “working at one's desk”, “working on one's laptop”, “speaking on the phone”, “working on customer project X”, “being located in a room Y” or even “enjoying a vacation”.
Example information sources about these activities can include a person's e-mail calendar, the person's online status in an enterprise portal, an online status in a public portal, the organization's vacation calendar in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, a shift plan in a Workforce Management system (WMS), a list of assigned projects in a Project Management system (PMS), or a travel plan in a Travel Management system (TMS). Other sources could be RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags which are embedded in a person's company id card that is always carried by the person. RFID scanners and related systems serve then as a location presence provider. Another source of information, useful in a globally-distributed team, is the current time in a person's time zone.
For each of the business activities, an extensible and dynamic set of characteristics can be defined for people to communicate and interact with each other. These sets of characteristics are known as “presence.” A combination of such activities and information sources within the realm of the organization is called “business presence.”